In a surprise move, EMI announced on 28th October 1994 the long awaited
release of Live At The BBC, the official compilation
of the Beatles' legendary BBC radio sessions. The double
length album, which was first mooted as long ago as 1979, finally arrived on
30th November 1994, just in time for the Christmas market.

The two disc set was one of the fastest and biggest selling (eight million
copies) albums of the year. Due to an unexpectedly massive demand for the album,
CD stocks sold out almost immediately, leaving hundreds of thousands of orders
unfulfilled. Despite this debacle, it debuted at number 3 in America and number
1 in Britain.

The CDs, with a running time in excess of seventy minutes each, contain a 48 page
booklet with an introduction by Derek Taylor. Sleeve notes
from BBC producer Kevin Howlett detail the recording dates of
each track and their corresponding original radio broadcast details. The album
comprises 69 indexed tracks, taken from many Beatles BBC
radio broadcasts from 1963 to 1965. Also included are thirteen original spoken
word items.

Live At The BBC is an adrenalin fuelled magic
carpet ride to the era before psychedelia, before political pop, before the
world lost its innocent, naive enthusiasm for the starmaking machinery.
Assembled by George Martin, Live At
The BBC comes closer to anything to capturing the essence of the
hundreds of live Beatles shows at the Cavern in the years
leading up to their world conquest.

Ringo: It was a really cool album. I knew it would do OK,
but it just took off. It was great. I love it because it showed people weren't
just fab and famous, we were really cool musicians. That was really how we
played. We started live.

Almost all of the songs that the Beatles never recorded at
EMI are included on Live At The BBC, with the
exception of early renditions of Dream Baby, Besame Mucho,
A Picture Of You and I'm Talking About You (no quality tapes
of all four tracks seem to have survived). The only major omissions are Lend
Me Your Comb (later to be released on Anthology 1)
and Beautiful Dreamer.

It's common knowledge that the BBC only kept two of the Beatles'
radio sessions in their archive, and only one of those was complete. In the
1980s, the BBC missed the opportunity to purchase a collection of top quality
recordings from a listener (who had taped them on industry standard equipment
back in the 1960s) on the basis that, technically and legally speaking, they
already owned the material anyway. The listener sold out to the highest bidder
which, not suprisingly, resulted in a thirteen LP bootleg series.

Luckily for EMI, a major source of audio then came from the widow of an avid home audiotape collector from the time, who sold her husband's original reel-to-reel tapes directly to EMI for an undisclosed sum. This purchase was somewhat of an embarrassment for the company as they had already paid a large sum of money to George Martin who had been remixing other tapes previously acquired.

But there were still a few gaps
to be filled and it was for this reason that contact had to made with some
'alternative sources'.

Kevin Howlett: Some people phoned up and said they had
some tapes. One journeyed down to London with his five inch reels and that's how
Keep Your Hands Off My Baby appeared on the album. Over the years,
it's really been a process of putting the Beatles archive back
together really, as more and more stuff has come to light. We came across two
ten inch reels with 'The Beatles' on the spine. One of these
was a half hour reel featuring them larking around for the 65 Christmas show.
The other half hour reel included them performing I Feel Fine and
She's A Woman. It had false starts, takes which broke down half way
through and talkback between the group and the control room. It was fascinating.
It's just a question of how well the material has lasted over the years and in
what form. I can remember George Martin saying to me that a
disc is quite a good storage medium and that he was quite happy to master from
it.

Guided as much by the demands of sound quality as by musical perfectionism,
the album was compiled by Beatles producer George
Martin over several years, but precise mixing dates and details are not
available. In the case of Keep Your Hands Off My Baby Martin
realised that Lennon's performance was so staggering that the
abrupt drop in reproduction quality paled alongside the impact of the music.
Elsewhere, there are moments where the sound on the thin, flawed tapes distort a little, or waver in
volume.

When work on the Beatles project began in earnest around
the middle of 1992, engineer Peter Mew became involved
utilising the SonicSolutions computer enhancement system at Abbey Road. One of
the problems which Peter had to contend with was sound
dropouts, especially when working with some of the rarer recordings. Whilst he
was able to repair most of them, there were still a few instances where this was
just not possible.

Peter Mew: After George Martin had
chosen the tracks they were passed over to me for de-noising, EQing and all the
rest of it. Over the period of two and a half years that album went through
various changes, running order changes, title changes and things like that.
Overall it must have gone through seven different versions. Coming from so many
different sources, each track had its own problems. The art of using a computer
system is that they allow you to take very small slithers of sound from
elsewhere and patch them in. But if you can't find a matching piece of sound
from somewhere else in the song you just can't do it. On A Taste Of Honey,
for instance, there's an analogue dropout that has bugged me from the word go,
but I couldn't do anything about it because that piece of sound wasn't repeated
anywhere else in the song.

Details of the BBC Beatles recordings can be found in
The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark
Lewisohn (Pyramid Books 1992).